Daffodils
They appear before the bluebonnets in Texas, their slender tips breaking through the black clay soil that is characteristic of the land. I brought the daffodil bulbs from exile in Southern California. I had spent the last two years there so homesick for the familiar, in a place known for both it's beauty and it's pain. For the last five years my family and I have been high tech gypsies, roaming the land, in search of a place to call home. Amid rumors of restructures and buy outs, we transferred to North Carolina. Caught in a lay off, we were sent far off to Southern California. It is now by choice we have settled here outside Dallas. Three out of state moves, six different houses since we left our home of thirteen years in Central Florida, I am feeling a little shell shocked and a bit weary. I find myself starting over yet again. I am so very well educated in the process, and so surprised by the reality of a new life in a strange town. I had forgotten the depth of the loneliness, the over sensitivity with which I interpret situations, meaningless to others whose lives have the completeness of a circle of friends. They have those friendly voices greeting them in surprise at the grocery or library. These are the things I tend to take for granted, except when I am taken from familar ground and transplanted in new soil, just like my daffodils.
It was with sweet delight that I gazed out a rain blurred window onto my patio garden in Mission Viejo one March day and saw those daffodils for the first time. A wisp of hope, a familiar sight, someone had left daffodils for me! They had lain there hidden in the dark, during those long first awkward months, waiting to appear just when I thought I could bear no more. "Rejoice, you have not been forgotten. I go before you and prepare a way," they seemed to repeat, a promise I had hidden long ago in my heart and had forgotten until that day.
"See I am sending an angel ahead of you to guard you along the way and to bring you to a place I have prepared." Exodus 23:20
I am weary again. Can I bear any more days when nobody calls and the mail man leaves only junk mail? I have learned to take things in stride. I excuse those who pass me by unrecognized, and say, " the Lord will provide me friends." I felt the hope before I saw the first signs of life this spring. Shortly after, they came before the bluebonnets, daffodils I had dug up from my garden and brought with me. It was my hands this time that placed them there, the first flowers in my garden of hope.
"All men are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord stands forever."
1 Peter 1:24-25
If I can remember whose child I am and the great care He gives to detail, for even the lilies of the field do not escape His attention and care, (Luke 12:27) and neither will my needs go unnoticed.
This morning after dropping off my youngest boy from pre-kindergarten, I passed a woman from my Sunday School. She smiled and waved. I returned home to find my daffodils just about to bloom.